New Territory

Well its official, I am moved to a new town.  And its not so easy to make it back to the park where I used to run every day.  While its sad, I am optimistic about finding a new park that I will love equally as much.

The past two days have been spent with printed maps in hand, exploring new parks.  The first is called Hemlock Hills and while its not nearly as large as my old park it was the most similar that I've seen thus far.  It had a large road sized trail with many off shoots of single rider trails.  We explored about 2 miles of the trails and I feel like I have a grip on how to navigate around the park.  Its fairly hilly and my cell phone seemed to work the whole time we were hiking.

The second trail was a rail to trail and while it was nice and flat and had fresh crushed gravel on the trail, it was almost too flat.  I found it kind of boring to run on.  The trail follows high tension wires and looking at the backs of people's home and the large poles were less than thrilling.  I will say that seeing the trail in front of me just made me want to get it over with, and before I knew it I was running one to two minutes faster than my normal pace.  So its a great trail to use for my speed work days, but I don't think I will be putting in any distance days here.

When I was thinking about new running shoes (which I need) I was thinking about road shoes as I thought I'd be running on roads more frequently.  I also through about a hybrid pair.  However, it now looks like I will be able to continue to trail run as frequently as I want so I'm going to try a new brand of trail shoes.  I usually wear North Face trail shoes, but I'm not going to hit a North Face outlet any time soon and they aren't easy to find other wise.  So I've done some research and I am going to try a pair of Brooks.  I hope they work out well!